The recent United States airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities—executed in close coordination with Israel and lauded by former President Donald Trump as a “spectacular military success”—represent not merely a kinetic operation, but a deliberate recalibration of the regional strategic order. These bombings, targeting Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, signify the attempted reassertion of a coercive diplomacy paradigm, one in which brute force substitutes protracted negotiation, undermining international norms of non-aggression and deepening the trust deficit between Tehran and Washington.
What complicates this strategic gambit is its simultaneous invocation of both realpolitik and rhetorical appeals to peace, revealing a pattern best theorized through Trita Parsi’s Losing an Enemy (2017), which illustrates how U.S.-Iran relations have long oscillated between containment and conditional engagement. That Iran responded not with retreat but with strikes into northern and central Israel reveals not only an operational capacity for asymmetric escalation but a fundamental rejection of negotiation under duress—especially when negotiations are used, as Iranian analysts claim, as a veil for military aggression.
From Tehran’s perspective, the current dynamic represents a structural repetition of betrayal. Iran’s foreign ministry, invoking both the UN Charter and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), condemned the strikes as a “barbaric move” that shattered even the minimal pretense of diplomacy. Iranian officials maintain that, having remained a committed party to the JCPOA for years—even after its unilateral abrogation by Trump—their current refusal to return to negotiations stems not from diplomatic intransigence but from rational distrust. The destruction of facilities under the cover of scheduled nuclear talks underscores what Arundhati Roy calls, in Azadi (2020), “the theater of negotiation under imperial supervision,” where diplomatic engagement serves primarily to legitimize coercive power.
From the vantage point of U.S. policymakers, however, the strikes were framed as instruments of reestablishing deterrence. Drawing on the Clausewitzian logic that war is an extension of politics by other means, some officials and analysts argue that these strikes were not a repudiation of diplomacy, but rather a recalibration designed to create new leverage. Yet, as explored in Rosa Brooks’ How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything (2017), such justifications blur the boundaries between diplomacy and war, rendering peaceful resolution secondary to displays of force.
Importantly, the implications of the strikes go beyond immediate tactical success. According to former IAEA officials, while Fordow and Natanz may have been significantly damaged, it remains uncertain whether the highly enriched uranium stockpiles—amounting to hundreds of kilograms at 60% purity—were evacuated in time. This uncertainty highlights the risks inherent in attacking nuclear sites without verifying material security. The specter of radiation leakage and regional contamination, coupled with the long-term resilience of Iran’s nuclear knowledge infrastructure, makes total denuclearization by force an implausible objective.
Moreover, the retaliatory attacks by Iran using high-yield, precision-guided missiles such as the Horamshahre, which reportedly struck Tel Aviv with significant damage, signal not a collapse in Iranian capability, but a tactical pivot toward deterrence through demonstration. The asymmetrical nature of this retaliation, coupled with Iran’s robust missile arsenal and regional proxies, exemplifies the logic detailed in Sima Shakhsari’s Politics of Rightful Killing (2020): that power, for postcolonial states, is often not manifested through symmetrical parity but through strategic resistance and disruption.
Iranian officials emphasize that the real danger lies not only in U.S. attacks but in the broader erosion of international institutions. Repeated references to the IAEA’s failure to prevent or condemn the bombings underscore a growing perception within Iran—and across parts of the Global South—that Western-dominated multilateralism has lost both legitimacy and relevance. This aligns with Vijay Prashad’s Washington Bullets (2020), which critiques the co-optation of global governance frameworks as instruments of strategic control rather than impartial arbitration.
Indeed, Iranian speakers draw attention to the growing disillusionment with frameworks like the NPT, which are seen as mechanisms used selectively against adversarial states. They contrast their own nuclear abstinence—underscored by the Supreme Leader’s fatwa forbidding the development of nuclear weapons—with the tacit acceptance of undeclared arsenals by states like Israel. Within this context, calls in Iran to withdraw from the NPT altogether are gaining traction, especially as the IAEA is increasingly perceived as complicit rather than neutral.
Furthermore, the threat of regime change—explicit in Israeli strategic discourse but disavowed by Trump—remains a central anxiety in Iran’s strategic posture. The recent assassination of Iranian scientists and generals, along with cyber operations and drone incursions, have all been interpreted as part of a broader campaign to destabilize Iran from within. Yet, rather than sparking internal dissent, these actions appear to have galvanized public support, with mass mobilizations and chants condemning both the United States and Israel. This counters Western narratives of a fragile regime on the brink of collapse and reaffirms what Azadeh Moaveni describes in Guest House for Young Widows (2019) as “the resilience of political identity under siege.”
On the question of escalation, Iran is confronted with a constrained set of options. While the closing of the Strait of Hormuz has long been viewed as a strategic red line, and one that would provoke massive American retaliation, Iranian officials seem acutely aware of the consequences such a move would entail. Nonetheless, they possess a panoply of instruments—ranging from cyberattacks and proxy mobilization to energy market disruption—that can impose strategic costs without crossing overt thresholds. Iran’s potential to incrementally disable U.S. assets or leverage asymmetric threats through regional actors like Hezbollah remains central to its deterrence posture.
Strategically, the divergence between U.S. and Israeli objectives could widen in the coming weeks. While Trump may have been motivated by a desire to coerce Iran back into negotiations—perhaps even hoping to crown himself as a peacemaker—Netanyahu appears singularly focused on regime change and comprehensive strategic decapitation. If Trump concludes that Israel’s escalation risks spiraling into a broader regional conflict, tensions within the alliance may emerge, fracturing the perception of a unified front and compelling recalibrations on both sides.
The strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, far from resolving the impasse, have ushered in a new phase of strategic ambiguity, where the thresholds between deterrence, diplomacy, and war are increasingly fluid. As regional actors recalibrate, and as institutions like the IAEA struggle to retain relevance, the question of what comes next looms ominously. Whether the conflict proceeds toward a negotiated de-escalation or devolves into prolonged confrontation will depend not only on military calculus but on the willingness of all actors to abandon maximalist fantasies and return to the arduous, imperfect, but indispensable labor of diplomacy.
References
Parsi, Trita. Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy. Yale University Press, 2017. Roy, Arundhati. Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. Haymarket Books, 2020. Brooks, Rosa. How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything. Simon & Schuster, 2017. Shakhsari, Sima. Politics of Rightful Killing. Stanford University Press, 2020. Prashad, Vijay. Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations. LeftWord Books, 2020. Moaveni, Azadeh. Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS. Random House, 2019.
